Etsy: Company escaping 'race to the bottom', getting back to its artisan roots
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Etsy loosened rules that limited generic sales in order to gain growth, and where the rules still have restrictions (i.e. the use of external delivery, including drop-shipping, are permitted as long as you designed the item), those restrictions are a mix of difficult to enforce (i.e. takes man-power to police) and easy to work around (drop-shipped product has a custom logo on the box, does that count if the logo is your design?).
The market is proven, and to chase valuation traps in volatile fits and starts does a disservice to all stakeholders.
Isn’t drop-shipping when a seller has the manufacturer ship an item to a buyer directly without designing it?
https://trajann.com/products/dolphin-pen-holder-planter-vase
then that's drop-shipping. In the background,
has my OBJ files in their system and they will do the 3D-printing and send it to you. My team did the design, so it is a unique item. But my team does not handle the day-to-day printing and shipping, because that would be exhausting and then we wouldn't have time to make new designs anymore.
It's so little effort that the platform has been entirely flooded with low quality garbage.
I now officially have zero reason to shop there. I haven't for the past little while because it's mostly been dropshippers from Alibaba anyway.
Etsy had a niche, it was out-competing vintage shops, swap-meets, and markets. Now, in light of mismanagement and poor financials they decided to check notes directly compete with _the_ largest ecommerce website in the universe, and one of the largest tech companies.
I can't help but picture a board room of suits all high-fiving and cheering when an exec changes between a slide of Etsy's yearly profits to Amazon's yearly profits chanting "this is us. this is us."
I actually mis-read the headline that way too. They're doing the opposite - making sure they are only selling hand made items (again) and NOT competing with Amazon anymore.
It's a misleading PR move pretending to move back to "hand-made" items with loopholes big enough to drive a planet through.
It reminds me of a museum gift shop on the decline. Full of cheap, mass produced junk that is vaguely related to the original premise with an authentic show piece in the window to remind shoppers of the theme.
They should crack down on people scraping thingiverse and printables and auto posting models.
Basically just use the site and take action. IMO it’s unusable right now. It’s temu with higher prices.
"Designed by a seller" includes "seller-prompted AI art", too. https://www.etsy.com/seller-handbook/article/1276491338090
As for your second point that would be almost impossible to enforce, and the line isn’t super clear. What if I generate an image and then make a depth map from that to 3D print? Or do a screen print on a shirt with it?
"Here's a curated selection of my favorite dancewear I drop-ship from AliExpress" seems to fit that just fine.
Easy for something mass produced to be handpicked by a seller or sourced by a seller.
Yes, those are categories that shouldn't be on a site that is what Etsy claims they want to be.
"Vintage items must be at least 20 years old" - https://web.archive.org/web/20180221040206/https://www.etsy....
Old: "Everything listed for sale on Etsy must be handmade, vintage, or a craft supply."
New: "everything listed for sale on Etsy must be made, designed, handpicked, or sourced by a seller."
Anyway, doesn't the new change mean that it was 20 and is 0 years?
Being able to filter out those would be nice. I wonder what counts as made/designed though. If assembling something counts as "made" or slapping a logo on a white label product counts as "designed" then it's not much of an improvement.
For example, I want some nearly unique leather shoes.
1. I find a shoemaker on Etsy who is selling their wares. 2. I find a shoe designer on Etsy 3. I find a shoe on Etsy whose seller has purchased vintage shoes from another store. 4. I find a shoe on Etsy that is from an importer who works with a shoemaker in Leon, Mexico.
Those are all what I would expect to find in an artisinal store. I could see how these could be abused to support Temu, but also how you could enforce them to remove listings that are abusive.
“The platform’s new rules require all items to incorporate “a human touch” as outlined by its creativity standards”
That’s just as bad as hand crafted pizza in the frozen grocery aisle - yes at one point someone had to design this pizza, then they crank them out on a machine like everything else.
Yep. By that measure, every mass-produced item you can buy was "hand crafted" at some point.
For example, they used to pay dividends instead of growing indefinitely. Remember that?
“Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 204 Mich 459; 170 NW 668 (1919), is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a manner for the benefit of his employees or customers.”
This has been often sited as the beginning of ‘shareholder primacy,’ which has become parodied into the particularly stupid (if often accurate) meme of ‘line must go up.’
Somehow I doubt that Etsy is prepared for the massive reduction in revenues (and hence stock price) that this entails, and if they are then their shareholders aren't. But words are cheap.
> The company on Tuesday is launching a major overhaul of the policies that govern its site to make it “crystal clear” to shoppers what products belong on Etsy
And this is a big part of why I'm skeptical. Etsy was never unclear about this. They just didn't care to enforce their policy. A major effort to "clarify" what was clear strikes me as a PR move rather than a serious effort to bring Etsy back to what it was.
But we'll see! I'd love to see Etsy come back and hope they will.
Unfortunately enforcement requires man-power. Even if you can automate a lot of the process, you still need people to deal with false positive and other disputes. Man-power costs money.
Which is why, similarly, Amazon doesn't care about fake items being sold on their store. Every sale on their site is revenue, so no incentive to kick out any sellers. Though we’ll see how that pans out long term. I still shop on Amazon, but significantly less than in the past after too many fakes. Have moved a lot of my online shopping to HomeDepot / B&H / Walmart (no marketplace), or direct from the website of whatever the product is.
They turned it into a fraud-ridden garbage pile years ago. It's full of drop shippers and sellers who market "handmade" items from Alibaba and Amazon at huge markups. And of course full of extremely low effort junk items like places that "personalize" something for you and then claim it's handmade even though they bought it from Walmart.
Always do a reverse image search. You'll save sometimes more than half the cost.
I've reported countless listings that say they're handmade but are clearly on Alibaba. They're totally against the rules. Nothing ever happens.
You can tell they know this is yet another shitty change because they blocked any community comments on it.
We desperately need an alternative.
https://www.etsy.com/legal/policy/adult-nudity-and-sexual-co...
I know many creators and makers and artisans that are basically going to go out of business because Etsy's pulling the platform out from underneath them.
Hahaha! But also, oh my god, why? Why do you do this, Etsy?
Being this specific is silly. "Great-grandpa's slut" or anything about grandchildren would be kosher. Half-siblings, too. Oops.
It's fun!
The problem with Etsy is things get lost in the eBay like interface.
With Shopify, they don’t attempt to solve (and then fail at) the discovery problem - it’s just websites! The discovery problem is better solved by networks like Instagram, Pinterest, Forums, RL
If you use one account and buy everything with one account and are always signed in, you're fine.
If however you order something and use your email address but are not logged in, you get your invoice and tracking to your email address but that order does not appear in your account, and if you go to the website/app and try to use it to track your order/respond to seller messages/whatever, you can't find it there. You have to go to a different page, a link in the email, and "claim" the order with your account.
Oh, also, if you aren't logged in and use a different email, a different account is created, based on that email, and the order is... half-claimed to that account, meaning you can't claim it with your actual account unless you jump through some hoops. Otherwise you can create an account with that half account to track that one order, and there's also no way to transfer orders without contacting support.
Also, if you use PayPal and aren't logged in, they just go ahead and create an entirely new account without a password, so you reset the password to eventually track that order, and all the other issues above.
I have something like four etsy accounts now and I've never seen a website make such a dog's dinner out of something as otherwise straight forward as accounts.
Are there actually still forums for something like this? I agree that would be a better method of discovery.
That seller glued on something that looks like an LP, other sellers glue on on other low-effort junk.